Philosophy of Emerging Media

Understanding, Appreciation, Application

Edited by Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz

Designed for both philosophy and emerging media studies programs to spark interdisciplinary work

Addresses the possible transformation of conceptions of identity and human nature caused by emergin media

Includes discussion of the cell phone between a philosopher of mathematics and a sociologist

Philosophy of Emerging Media

Understanding, Appreciation, Application

Edited by Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz

Description

The term "emerging media" responds to the "big data" now available as a result of the larger role digital media play in everyday life, as well as the notion of "emergence" that has grown across the architecture of science and technology over the last two decades with increasing imbrication. The permeation of everyday life by emerging media is evident, ubiquitous, and destined to accelerate. No longer are images, institutions, social networks, thoughts, acts of communication, emotions and speech-the "media" by means of which we express ourselves in daily life-linked to clearly demarcated, stable entities and contexts. Instead, the loci of meaning within which these occur shift and evolve quickly, emerging in far-reaching ways we are only beginning to learn and bring about.

This volume's purpose is to develop, broaden and spark future philosophical discussion of emerging media and their ways of shaping and reshaping the habitus within which everyday lives are to be understood. Drawing from the history of philosophy ideas of influential thinkers in the past, intellectual path makers on the contemporary scene offer new philosophical perspectives, laying the groundwork for future work in philosophy and in media studies. On diverse topics such as identity, agency, reality, mentality, time, aesthetics, representation, consciousness, materiality, emergence, and human nature, the questions addressed here consider the extent to which philosophy should or should not take us to be facing a fundamental transformation.

Philosophy of Emerging Media

Understanding, Appreciation, Application

Edited by Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz

Author Information

Juliet Floyd is Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. She is the author of many articles on the history of eighteenth and twentieth century philosophy of mathematics, logic, and aesthetics and co-editor of Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (Oxford, 2001) and Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (Springer, forthcoming).

James E. Katz is the Feld Professor of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. Co-author of numerous books, including The Social Media President: Barack Obama and The Politics of Citizen Engagement, he also holds two patents. Prior to coming to Boston University in 2012, he was the Board of Governors Professor of Communication at Rutgers University.

Contributors:

Bruno Ambroise is Junior Researcher in Philosophy at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is currently working on the epistemology and history of speech acts theories and pragmatics, and studying the relations between linguistic theories and social sciences. He has published many papers on Austin's philosophy, speech acts theories and pragmatics, and a book entitled Qu'est-ce qu'un acte de parole ? (Paris: Vrin, 2008).

Valérie Aucouturier is Maîtresse de Conférences in philosophy, history and epistemology of psychology at University Paris-Descartes and CERMES3. Her research lies at the intersection between contemporary philosophy of mind and action and philosophy of psychology. She recently published Qu'est-ce que l'intentionalité? (Vrin, 2012) and Elizabeth Anscombe. L'esprit en pratique (CNRS Editions, 2013).

Harvey Cormier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the author of The Truth Is What Works, a book on William James's theory of truth, and a number of articles on a variety of philosophical topics.

Ronald E. Day is in the Dept. of Information and Library Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research is in Documentation and Information Science. Among many other works he has written The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power and Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data.

Ilit Ferber teaches philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. Her publications include Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford University Press, 2013) and articles on Benjamin, Leibniz, Herder, Freud, Heidegger and Scholem. She has also co-edited Philosophy's Moods (Springer, 2011) and Lament in Jewish Thought (De Gruyter, 2014).

Marizio Ferraris is full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he is also the director of the LabOnt (Laboratory for Ontology). He is a columnist for 'La Repubblica', the director of 'Rivista di Estetica' and the co-director of 'Critique' and the 'Revue francophone d'esthétique'.

Juliet Floyd is Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. She is the author of many articles on the history of eighteenth and twentieth century philosophy of mathematics, logic, and aesthetics and co-editor of Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (Oxford, 2001) and Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (Springer, forthcoming).

Gordon Graham is Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts, and Director of the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of many philosophical papers, and his books include The Internet: a philosophical inquiry (Routledge 1999), subsequently translated into Dutch, Spanish, Greek and Korean. His most recent book is Wittgenstein and Natural Religion (Oxford University Press, 2014).

John Grey earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Spinoza from Boston University. He currently teaches at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in the History of Philosophy Quarterly.

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs in the University of St Andrews. He is also Remick Senior Fellow in the Center for Ethics and Culture and the University of Notre Dame; Chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, London; and Consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome.

Richard H.R. Harper FRSA, FIET is Principal Researcher in Socio-Digital Systems
at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England where he uses an understanding of human values to help change the technological landscape in the 21st century. He is author of Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload (MIT Press, 2010). A sociologist by training, he is concerned with how to design for James E. Katz is the Feld Professor of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. Co-author of numerous books, including The Social Media President: Barack Obama and The Politics of Citizen Engagement, he also holds two patents. Prior to coming to Boston University in 2012, he was the Board of Governors Professor of Communication at Rutgers University.

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Among his many interests is inferring individual behavior from aggregate data. He also co-founded Crimson Hexagon, a social media analytics software company.

Zsuzsanna Kondor is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities. Her writings comprise several main fields of research: history of philosophy, philosophy of communication, philosophy of cognition, and philosophy of images. Her publications include Enacting Images. Representation Revisited (ed.), 2013 and Victor J. Krebs is Professor of Philosophy, Pontifical Catholic University of Perú. He has published on Wittgenstein, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and currently works on film, media and technology, and is author of Del alma y el arte (1998), La recuperación del sentido (2008), La imaginación pornográfica (2014) and contributing coeditor (with William Day) of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Sybille Krämer is Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. She held guest professorships in Graz, Luzern, Tokyo, Zürich, Wien. She was Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin; currently she is member of the Senate of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and member of the Scientific Panel of the European Research Council. Her main areas of interest are philosophy of language and media theory, philosophy of rationalism, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Lars Lundsten is a Docent at the University of Helsinki and Principal Lecturer in the Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland, where he is head of research in media ecology.

Kristóf Nyíri is member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main fields of research include: the history of philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries; the impact of communication technologies on the organization of ideas and on society; the philosophy of images; the philosophy of time. Homepage: www.hunfi.hu/nyiri
.
Elizabeth A. Robinson is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Nazareth College, Rochester, New York. She received her PhD from Boston University in 2012, having written a dissertation on Kant's metaphysics and mathematics. She has published several articles, primarily addressing early modern philosophy.

David Roochnik is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He is the author of five books and some thirty articles on Ancient Greek Philosophy. His most recent work is Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis (SUNY: 2013).

John Richard Sageng is a research affiliate at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. He is one of the founders of the ".
Peter Simons is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Manchester, and taught in the UK (Bolton, Leeds) and Austria (Salzburg). His work centres on metaphysics (pure and applied), philosophy of logic, and the history of philosophy and logic in Central Europe. He is a member of the British, European and Royal Irish Academies.

Barry Smith is known primarily for his work on applications of ontology in extra-philosophical domains such as biology and biomedicine, defense and security. Most recently he has been working on what he calls the
Neal Thomas is an Assistant Professor of media and technology studies in the Department of Communication Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. With interests that generally lie at the intersection of social computing and social theory, his research focuses on the formal, cultural and semiotic dimensions of algorithms.

Philosophy of Emerging Media

Understanding, Appreciation, Application

Edited by Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz

Reviews and Awards

"[T]his book is an excellent introduction to the philosophical issues concerning the emergent media. The breadth of philosophical scope and the variety of philosophical positions applied to the issues make it particularly valuable. It opens numerous paths to further development of genuinely philosophical approaches to the media from a varied menu of approaches that utilize most contemporary philosophical schools...the work is excellent in offering ideas for further development and application." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews